Epidemiology and evolution of novel deltacoronaviruses in birds in central China

作者：Qiong Wang, Zhijian Zhou, Zhi You, Deng‐Yu Wu, Shujing Liu, Wanlin Zhang, Ke‐Rui Fan, Rui Luo, Ye Qiu, Xing‐Yi Ge · 发表于：Transboundary and Emerging Diseases · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1111/tbed.14029 · 被引用次数：29 · 研究领域：Animal Virus Infections Studies、SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research、interferon and immune responses

The variety and widespread of coronavirus in natural reservoir animals is likely to cause epidemics via interspecific transmission, which has attracted much attention due to frequent coronavirus epidemics in recent decades. Birds are natural reservoir of various viruses, but the existence of coronaviruses in wild birds in central China has been barely studied. Some bird coronaviruses belong to the genus of Deltacoronavirus. To explore the diversity of bird deltacoronaviruses in central China, we tested faecal samples from 415 wild birds in Hunan Province, China. By RT-PCR detection, we identified eight samples positive for deltacoronaviruses which were all from common magpies, and in four of them, we successfully amplified complete deltacoronavirus genomes distinct from currently known deltacoronavirus, indicating four novel deltacoronavirus stains (HNU1-1, HNU1-2, HNU2 and HNU3). Comparative analysis on the four genomic sequences showed that these novel magpie deltacoronaviruses shared three different S genes among which the S genes of HNU1-1 and HNU1-2 showed 93.8% amino acid (aa) identity to that of thrush coronavirus HKU12, HNU2 S showed 71.9% aa identity to that of White-eye coronavirus HKU16, and HNU3 S showed 72.4% aa identity to that of sparrow coronavirus HKU17. Recombination analysis showed that frequent recombination events of the S genes occurred among these deltacoronavirus strains. Two novel putative cleavage sites separating the non-structural proteins in the H...